Tuesday, June 18, 2019



Senate President Larry Obhof Introduces Senate Budget Bill to Provide More Educational Options to Ohio Families

The State Senate introduced their substitute budget bill today, and parents and Christian schools are among the big winners.

The bill significantly expands the state’s “EdChoice” scholarship program, which empowers parents to send their child to the school that best meets their needs.

“Senate President Larry Obhof is leading the way to provide Ohio students more opportunities to succeed,” said Aaron Baer, President of Citizens for Community Values. “The proposed budget the Senate introduced today ensures Ohio’s public schools can thrive, while opening up doors of opportunities for families to find the best school that meets their needs.”

The proposed Senate budget will:

Grow the EdChoice Expansion Scholarship to include K-12 students.
Increase the Cleveland Scholarship.

Year round application window and language that would fundamentally remove waitlists from EdChoice.

Citizens for Community Values leads the Ohio Christian Education Network (OCEN), a network of 27 Christian schools across Ohio providing high quality education to Ohio families. The Senate budget bill will help these schools provide children from across the state with a high-quality education, regardless of the child’s zip code or family income.

“No child should be stuck in a school that’s not meeting their needs. Senate President Larry Obhof, Majority Leader Matt Huffman, Finance Committee Chairman Matt Dolan, and Senator Lou Terhar are helping families succeed and access a broad array of educational options by putting this budget bill forward,” said Baer.

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The National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs: What Happens When Everyone Gets a ‘Free Lunch’?

A yogurt company, Chobani, has picked up the tab for unpaid school lunches in a Rhode Island school district.

That’s a relief to the school district, but not one likely to be replicated elsewhere. A new report finds that it would take a whole lot of dairy to fix the waste and misspent money in federal school meal programs nationwide.

In May, Chobani said it would cover nearly $50,000 that schools in Warwick, Rhode Island, had accumulated in unpaid lunch debt. The district’s problems are due to school officials’ inability to resolve school lunch accounts with parents and families, and Chobani’s generous gesture should bring relief to school accountants around Warwick.

But this price tag pales in comparison to the cash lost due to improper payments and misspending that the U.S. Government Accountability Office has found in National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program services across the U.S.

To make matters worse, the Department of Agriculture has changed the way it measures waste, making it more difficult to account for taxpayer money that’s supposed to provide meals for low-income students.

In 2018, U.S. taxpayers spent $17 billion on these two federal school lunch programs combined. Yet for decades, these programs have been plagued by misspending and improper payments (services provided to ineligible children), as the Government Accountability Office’s report explains.

Over the last four years, these programs have had improper payment rates of 16 percent and 23 percent, respectively.

According to the Office of Management and Budget, the National School Lunch Program lost nearly $800 million owing to improper payments in fiscal year 2018, while the School Breakfast Program lost $300 million. The Office of Management and Budget calls these programs “high-priority” programs because of the misspending.

According to the latest Government Accountability Office report, the estimated error rates for 2018 were lower than in prior years because the Department of Agriculture has “changed what it considers to be an improper payment.” As a result, it is impossible to compare the most recent error rates with prior years. 

That’s one way to clean your books.

Here’s another. In 2010, Congress and the Obama administration expanded school meal programs through a provision in the Healthy and Hunger-Free Kids Act called the “Community Eligibility Provision.”

As Heritage Foundation research explains, this provision allows schools, districts, and even groups of schools located in the same area where 40 percent of student enrollment is eligible for federal assistance (such as food stamps) to offer free meals to all students.

Poof—no more improper payments.

Except, the purpose of federal meal programs is to help children in need, and no private company has the reserves to cover Washington when spending spirals out of control.

Earlier this year, our research found that more middle- and upper-income students have taken advantage of free meals since lawmakers enacted the Community Eligibility Provision. Lawmakers made more students from upper-income households eligible for an error-prone federal program, defying both the program’s original purpose and any claim to fiscal responsibility.

Congress and the White House should eliminate this provision and focus resources on helping children in need, as recommended in Heritage’s “Blueprint for Balance.”

Doing so would have no impact on children from low-income families because these children would still be eligible for free- and reduced-priced meals. The move would simply help to control school meal programs that are ballooning into a federal food entitlement for every child, regardless of need.

Meanwhile, policymakers should ask the Department of Agriculture how its new accounting methods are making better use of taxpayer money.

The Government Accountability Office says the Department of Agriculture “has not established a process to plan and conduct regular fraud risk assessments for the school meals programs” and “high improper payment error rates may suggest that the school meals programs may also be inherently vulnerable to fraud.” Ignoring improper payments may lead to other problems.

Federal officials should improve risk management practices for school meals and focus on fraud prevention. Lawmakers can help do that by returning school meal programs to their original purpose of assisting children in need—and not add more students to waste-prone programs.

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Australia: Censoring universities ‘will lose best students’ researcher warns

Universities will lose reputation and talented students if they fail to defend free speech against an activist campus culture bent on shutting down debate, warns research­er Matthew Lesh.

“I’ve been phoned by parents and students asking which is the best university to go to for intellectual freedom,” said Mr Lesh, who audits campus freedom for the Institute of Public Affairs.

On Saturday, Education Minister Dan Tehan complained that universities were failing to take up the challenge of protecting free speech and had “their heads in the sand”.

Mr Tehan pointed to several attempts at censorship last year but agreed with former High Court chief justice Robert French, who reported on the issue in April and said Australia did not have the “crisis” seen in the US.

But Mr French said university rules and policies that could be turned against freedom of expressio­n were “rife” in Aust­ralia’s higher education sector.

And Mr Tehan said if the secto­r was on its way to a campus speech crisis, “we will end up a more divided and less harmonious Australia — and we should do everything we can to avoid that”.

Peak lobby group Universities Australia yesterday said the sector­ had put out a joint statement last year “reaffirming an endurin­g commitment to academic freedom and freedom of expression on our campuses”.

UA chief executive Catriona Jackson said the French report was getting “careful consideration”. When that report was released­, UA warned against imposition­ of sector-wide rules aimed at “a problem that has not been demonstrated to exist”.

Mr Lesh welcomed the University of Western Australia going it alone with a new manifesto on free expression that tells students they must be open to a robust exchange of ideas that may clash with their beliefs and make them feel uncomfortable.

The new statement, announced by UWA vice-chancellor Dawn Freshwater, represents the first serious response since the French report to incidents last year where campus activists tried to harass and silence controversial visiting speakers.

Also last year, James Cook University dismissed­ physics professor Peter Ridd, a critic of climate science methodology. This was unlawful, a court held in April.

Mr Lesh said UWA’s competitors for the best students were far away but serious commitment to open inquiry and free speech could become a factor in Sydney and Melbourne, where each city had elite rival institutions.

“If one of the major east coast universities decided to stake itself out as being for intellectual freedom, they could almost certainly attract more students,” he said.

The new UWA document stresses learning through “openness to considering ideas that challenge existing belief struct­ures”, resisting “inappropriate constraints on the freedom to ­express (ideas)”, while noting that “vilification of marginalised groups” remains taboo.

“Beyond (such) constraints, freedom of expression is unfettered within our university, and so a multitude of ideas will be encountere­d here,” it says.

“This freedom to express ideas is constrained neither by their perceived capacity to elicit discomfort, nor by presuppositions concerning their veracity.”

Professor Freshwater, who left school at 15 and stepped up from a diploma in nursing to a degree and then a doctorate, told ABC radio last year about the value of “being stretched (and) put in an uncomfortable position” as you learn. She likened this to free speech exposing young students to difficult ideas and feedback they might not want to hear.

The British-born educator now chairs the elite Group of Eight universities, and has just been headhunted by Auckland University to become its first female vice-chancellor next March.

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